Living in the Gap

True happiness and real productivity only come when we close the gap between intention and action.

The valley between those two points is where too many people spend the majority of their career.

In that valley we create techniques to distract ourselves from the need to turn our intentions into actions.

Most people do not realise the mental and emotional impact of unactioned intentions. It clouds our headspace and affects performance.

Very often, self-defeating symptoms appear as a direct result of the gap between intention and action. That affected headspace impacts performance. To provide long-term but incredibly practical solutions I have come to realise that although everybody wants to visibly perform better at work, most ignore the need for better performance in the headspace. This link is vital.

Performance is measured externally, but it is activated internally.

The link between headspace and performance is common sense, yet how often at work do we focus exclusively on external visible behaviours, and ignore the need to address headspace blockages which result from unactioned intentions.

One person “Bill” I remember very clearly was mystified as to why his successful career trajectory had suddenly stopped. As a star-performing IT consultant he had risen to high levels of responsibility and salary at a young age . But in the last twelve to eighteen months he had stalled. It seemed each time he took a step toward his next career milestone he was being blocked. The more he persisted it seemed the more the walls came up.

Through smart teams coaching we identified dominant thought patterns and found n Bill’s headspace important gaps between intention and action he had not bridged. The growing number of damaged egos and trail of broken relationships were an indicator of Bill increasing the gap between this feedback and his action. In fact, he had unwittingly created a recurring set of strategies to ensure that these thoughts were not acted on.

Intentions need to be acted on. We need to move from one to the other.

Smart teams explores practical tools and strategies to bridge the gap between your intentions and your actions, boosting performance and working smarter.